>>>I've had the problem when hitting a giant Oracle backend that had a kazillion records. I created a modal form that played a video, ran it before the requery started and closed it after the requery completed. In my case it was pretty simple to do because I had a classlib I wrote that did all the requerys, updates, etc. so only had to add it in my code in one place.
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>>I hear what you are saying, but I'm still having trouble understanding how much that gains. In any kind of n-tier environment, all that's demonstrating is that the client end (whether it's a FoxPro form, a web page, a winform, etc.) hasn't choked. If the query takes well more than the expected amount of time, I don't believe there's any ability to have async communications between the database (through a remote view) back to the client. (If I'm wrong on that, I'll stand corrected)
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>>I'm back to the original point, if 4-5 seconds is too long and a "you'll just need to be patient for 4-5 seconds" is not an acceptable statement to make to the users, I'd be looking at ways to improve the process.
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>>Then again, I have Verizon FIOS with 1 gigabit per second up and down, and there are times when I sign onto my bank that it takes 4 seconds to connect.
>My rule of thumb is that if there will be delay at all (more than sub-second) I display something to let the user know that something is happening.
>However, you're correct about looking at improving the process.
>- Inefficiencies can sneak in over time
>- New, more efficient, methods might be available

Ture -- but it all depends upon the backend. I have stuff that is querying bunch of tables with over a billion records in them -- so it's going to take a sec or two no matter how well the indexes are designed and database tuning is done. Of course this is not the norm - looking for network slowdowns, proper indexes in backend, and how much data you're pulling should for sure be looked at first. Once those are exhausted and query takes over 1 second.. then it's time to find a way to let the user know it's working and the app hasn't hung.